Reminiscing About Israel, Then and Now

Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

In 1972, while a graduate student at Brandeis University outside Boston, I spent the summer at the Mount Scopus (Har ha-Tsofim) campus of the Hebrew University, which had been an enclave within Jordanian east Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 and was not reopened until after the Six-Day War. (When the Jordanians denied Israeli access to Mount Scopus, a new campus was built at Givat Ram in western Jerusalem; it was completed in 1958.)

I used to walk down the hill from the campus, through east Jerusalem and the Old City, into West Jerusalem, with its cafes and museums – sometimes even in the evening.

That same summer, I visited the West Bank, including Ramallah, now the capital of the Palestinian Authority. Along with graduate student friends, I travelled down to Sharm el-Shek, the resort at the southernmost tip of the Sinai Peninsula, then occupied by Israel (the town had been renamed Ofira). We slept on the beach at night. Could anyone imagine doing that now?

Israel had come into possession of all these territories in the 1967 Middle East War, and a feeling of elation enveloped the country. During the so-called War of Attrition between Israel and Egypt in the years immediately following the war, Israeli aircraft bombed targets deep within Egyptian territory.

Some of the aerial dogfights that ensued involved Russian pilots flying Egyptian planes. Defence minister Moshe Dayan boasted that Israel could even defeat Egypt’s then ally, the Soviet Union.

Prior to 1967, Israel had been a small country that, unlike today, wasn’t in the news day and night. Tel Aviv looked like a modest European city. (I was there just after the war.) The country had been established by European Jewish pioneers who founded kibbutzim and labour unions.

It had been governed, from independence in 1948 on, by the semi-socialist Labour Party, and secular Haifa was more important than Jerusalem. Most non-Orthodox diaspora Jews did not regard Israel as the very center of their religious or cultural identity.

Israel had not yet become the focus of a global attack by its enemies, many of whom today consider it the very embodiment of evil, a state that must be destroyed.

In some ways, 1967-1973 was a golden age for Israel, but the dangerous sense of hubris set the stage for the catastrophe of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the ideological and political  retreats that would follow, and that now place it in grave danger.